Topic: Butterfly Labs - Bitforce Single and Mini Rig Box - page 83. (Read 186929 times)

I can put it back online if people want.  I just figured since one was in the wild, it was kind of redundant.

Since Inaba's single is no longer online, I thought I'd post the spreadsheet(LibreOffice Calc) I was using to track its performance.

http://www.fileswap.com/dl/eO5m5bYRg/Inaba_Single.ods.html

@RPH (Roger Patrick Harris?):

Do you really think that there will be 28nm FPGAs coming out in 7 - 8 months at an affordable price range? And if so, which companies are even doing R&D on a bitcoin mining solution?


Cheers,
nbtcminer

still showing $24.9 on the product page, but $29,890.00 on the detail page.  that a 20% price increase...which is huge.

BFL's performance per watt is only about half of a 45nm FPGA, and 1/4 of a 28nm FPGA.
It looks fine today compared to 45nm GPUs and I'm sure their marketing talents
will generate some short-term sales, but 45nm and 28nm FPGAs can and will destroy this thing technically.

The payoff for a BFL unit today (832MH/s, $599, constant price/difficulty) is around 7 months.
28nm FPGAs will be mining in large numbers well before then.

-rph

looks like they have raised the price on the rig box to $30,055.00 ... and have removed bitcoin as a payment method

remember these were made to plug and play easy to use  but i do agree  maybe they should use better heatsinks and or better fans

the big question then is exactly how tenacious the adhesive they used is.  if its just an adhesive TIM, no big job at all, if its thermal epoxy that cures strong like bull, well that's a much different situation, but most likely not a show stopper.

as for mounting the water block, i'm pretty sure a couple of zip ties and an adhesive thermal pad would do the job well.

i agree fully though, if they included mounting holes spaced like standard CPU holes, that would be the best option.

It has a heat spreader (no naked silicon).  Still rather daunting.  I guess BFL might be willing to sell boards with no heatsink or thermal epoxy but mounting a waterblock w/ thermal epoxy isn't something I would be comfortable with.  Not the kind of wattage (thermal load) we are talking about here.  Obviously the current cooling system is sub-optimal and they might be looking to change.  If/when they do I hope they put some push pin holes in the board even if they aren't used.  That would allow alternative cooling.  Not just watercooling but miner's experimenting w/ larger cpu style heatpipe heatsink fan assemblies.

No clue. Maybe they're just selling the more chips on a unit for less. However they're doing it, 1.38 mhash/1$ is really impressive.

BTC used to be an option. Email them and ask. From what people say, they usually answer emails in a timely manner.

This.  I would be even more tempted to buy one now if I could pay in BTC.

Although I think I'll wait for revision 2 (I know it will be awhile)

how is BFL getting roughly 2.1x MH that the others are getting?  is it purely a fx of the higher wattage and this on supposedly an older chip?  or are they doing something fundametally different?

One of those people claims to have seen their operator with "tons" of singles all over the place. If they can really produce 20-40-80 a week, they're going to sell like hot cakes. The fact Icarus uses 50% less power isn't going to win a lot of people over. Power is cheap, power for FPGAs is very minor. Unless you're spending $15k-$50k the power savings isn't worth the farm being 50% slower. No one is going to pay the same amount of money to get something half as fast. People are running 500-800-1200 watt monsters, some people multiple gpu rigs, 80watts a pop per butterfly single is a fraction of what they likely use right now.

So I'd argue $600 for 832mhash for 80 watts does blow the other FPGAs out of the water. Now that we know they're at least shipping units, we're more pictures/proof coming over the next week I'm sure, they're going to get a lot of orders.

But it's likely they won't be able to keep up with demand and the other FPGAs will get bought and supported. But there's going to be quite a few disappearing because they just can't match the price/performance. Hopefully they keep pushing the improve but these butterfly singles are really impressive.

If the butterfly, X6500, ztex, icarus are all available to order, people are going to buy the butterfly single. The saving grace is the butterfly singles likely aren't available in a timely manner, but that can change. The other guys aren't likely to get twice as fast in the same time span it takes butterfly to get up to speed.

weird, pretty sure it was.  still is there on the rig box, but not the singles.

that would be ideal, but with such a small board size, i'm sure we could come up with some kind system, when coupled with an adhesive TIM, it would only be partially responsible for anchoring the water block.


if they used actual thermal epoxy, it might indeed be a daunting task to remove the heatsink.  we'd need to know if it's naked silicon under the heatsink, or if there is a metal cap that the heatsink attaches to.  if its capped, often a razor blade and some patience go a long way, and you can scrape and sand any residue that can't be removed with a solvent.  can't do that with naked silicon.

Forgive me if someone asked already but I did not see it.

1. What platform is the included software for.  Must I run Windows or can I plug these into my Linux systems and have them play happily?

2. Why is BTC not an option for payment?

Yes, I saw a picture of cgminer handling one of these and two GPUs on another thread while I was at school today.

Also, @mouse:  "Seal Cub Clubbing Club" <-- lol

has this been tested on a machine with GPU's mining as well?

Point 1: The network may see a little hash rate.  Sure, it'll enable some people to start up mining again who originally quit because they were on the wrong side of the break-even point.  But a 5970 can do 550 MH/s @ 97W (over system idle anyway), so another 300 MH/s at 17W less isn't going to be a huge game-changer.  It's not like when everybody else was chugging along with 20 KH/s and then GPUs came along putting down a few GH/s on a single rig.